Victoria Redel interview

‘The Border of Truth’ a journey of discovery By TRESCA WEINSTEIN
First published: Sunday, November 25, 2007

In Victoria Redel’s new novel, “The Border of Truth,” heroine Sara Leader uncovers her father’s secrets bit by bit, through artifacts, research, memories and chance meetings. Simultaneously, the reader is given the truth one piece at a time, as Redel artfully unveils the story of Richard Leader, formerly Itzak Lejdel, a Belgian refugee who comes to America during World War II.

“The Border of Truth” (Counterpoint; 336 pages; $24.95) unfolds through letters written in 1940 by the 17-year-old Itzak, interspersed with chapters following Sara’s journey of discovery 63 years later. This layering of different points of view — and sometimes widely divergent versions of the truth — is characteristic of Redel’s work, which she says she approaches like a collage. Both “The Border of Truth” and her first novel, “Loverboy,” move backward and forward in time, telling a story through vivid images and scenes that gradually accumulate into a single, powerful picture.

“I’m fascinated in my daily life with people, and how even in a misunderstanding with a friend, there are two narratives that emerge, and there are places they overlap and places they diverge,” Redel said, speaking by phone from New York City, where she teaches at Columbia University. “The tension between different people’s truths is novelish — how they change us or how what we don’t know changes us, the way the unsaid thing, the omitted thing, is often no less true than the spoken thing.”
At the heart of “The Border of Truth” is a little-known fragment of history, which in the novel becomes a symbol of the refugee experience and the movement from old world to new. Unlike Sara, Redel grew up knowing about her father’s flight from Europe, which ended in Virginia in September 1940 when, after weeks of waiting, 86 refugees aboard a ship called the Quanza were granted permission to step foot on American soil. In the novel, 17-year-old Itzak, also a passenger aboard the Quanza, uses his time in limbo to type letters to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Redel says she saw Mrs. Roosevelt — who was instrumental in helping the Quanza refugees enter the country — as “an iconic American mother, a great looming competent American mother to whom (Itzak) can pour his heart out and confess to her the things he needs to.”

The theme of motherhood is also explored in the novel as Sara prepares to adopt a child — a quest that initiates her exploration into her family history.

The dangerously obsessive narrator of “Loverboy” is also a single mother by choice, but one whose desperate need to maintain an almost symbiotic relationship with her young son leaves the two of them in a vacuum that excludes all outside connections or family history.

“One of the things I love in writing is the opportunity to look at something in a way that’s more extreme than I would ever live it,” says Redel, who is the mother of two sons. “Anybody who’s a parent has felt that love for a kid. ‘Loverboy’ was a chance to push it to the extreme — (to find out) what would happen, if she would be able to come out of it or if she would get lost in it.”

While Redel calls “Loverboy” a classical tragedy, in which the heroine “brings upon herself the thing she is most afraid of,” “The Border of Truth” is in essence a coming-of-age story, for both the teenaged Itzak and 41-year-old Sara. In coming to grips with her father’s past, Sara is finally able to move forward toward a life with her new daughter and her first equal relationship with a man.

Along with learning much more about the Quanza’s passage and about her father’s experience, Redel faced issues she hadn’t expected in bringing her heroine’s journey to its conclusion. For example, she struggled with the moral decision of whether Sara should read the letters her father wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt or whether she should allow his deepest secrets to remain private.

“I didn’t know she’d have to deal with these things,” Redel said. “Each time you write something, you answer certain questions which you didn’t know you had.”